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Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 13:03:48 +0100
Message-ID: <CAGAGxbbtXyHPn85uYyO2v7QR3tbsyRyHZhhW06YXTNok_jsinA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Matteo Beccati <php@beccati.com>
Cc: Anatol Belski <anatol.php@belski.net>, Xinchen Hui <laruence@php.net>, 
	PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>, 
	Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>, Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: 64 bit string offsets
From: cw@daverandom.com (Chris Wright)

On 30 August 2014 12:53, Matteo Beccati <php@beccati.com> wrote:
> On 29/08/2014 23:58, Anatol Belski wrote:
>> On Fri, August 29, 2014 18:34, Xinchen Hui wrote:
>>> if a string is bigger than 2^32... I think there must be a bug.... :)
>>>
>> Only for this case you mean, or generally? As we safe with memory_limit
>> anyway.
>
> Even though size_t allows "huge" strings, would it be so bad to throw an
> error when one tries to create a string longer than 2^32 bytes,
> regardless of memory_limit?

This would be an unnecessary and somewhat arbitrary limitation. Yes,
loading >2GB of *anything* into memory in PHP *probably* makes no
sense (probably 99% of real-world installations have memory_limit set
much lower than this anyway), but just because we cannot think of a
valid use case does not mean there isn't one.

If the string index deref issue cannot be solved, it can simply be
documented as only working for offsets up to 2^31, but I personally am
not in favour of imposing limitations on the size of a string for a
non-technical reason.

Thanks, Chris